The Location Managers Guild International (LMGI) is the largest organization of Location Managers and Location Scouts in the motion picture, television, commercial and print production industries. Their membership plays a vital role in the creativ
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LMGI COMPASS | Winter 2020 • 47 to roll on the interior of the safe house while Cooley was looking for an exterior to match. He started snapping pictures of a build- ing with a very specific doorway and sent them to Niro. "I got the photos and immediately started showing them to everyone on set," Niro says. They agreed it was perfect—Niro took thirty min- utes to recreate the doorway, connecting to connect the practi- cal facade in Tlalnepantla to their set. When they went to Mexico later, there was the real door for a perfect match. "That's kinda the fun of what we're doing sometimes," says Cooley. ETEE ECTEMET MEETS UE EALT "What we always hope for with Mayans M.C. is a mix of height- ened excitement and grounded reality," says James, "that's why our locations play such an integral role and why Cooley and his team are, in many ways, our most important weapon." James believes he and the other writers "are able to take big- ger swings story-wise because of the locations that Cooley and his team present." Whether in Mexico or back in the U.S., there's a dusty, dirty, lived-in feel to the series that puts the viewer firmly into the world and you can feel it in every frame. "Even if something unbelievable is happening on the screen, the viewer needs to feel like it's real," says James. "Setting and location are key in pulling that off." In Los Angeles County, they frequently shoot in places like East Los Angeles, Lancaster, Acton, Newhall, Agua Dulce, Simi Valley, Lynwood and Agoura Hills. The exterior of the Mayans M.C. Santo Padre clubhouse was originally shot at a scrap yard in El Sereno, but has since been recreated and built onto their stage facade, allowing for continuous shots that go from the exterior to the in- terior. The clubhouse is the crew's only permanent stage set. Though he handles shooting in Mexico, Cooley has turned things in L.A. over to LM Rick Surad/LMGI. "I'm fully invested in maintaining the look of the show creatively, but I have to keep an eye on the budget as well," he says. One might think that, after moving an entire company to Mexico and back, shooting in L.A. would be a cake walk … but even L.A. can toss in a surprise or two from time to time. One of the major characters on the show is cartel leader Miguel Galindo (Danny Pino) and for season one, Cooley and the team found the perfect home base for the character in Agoura Hills. "When they first showed me that house, I was amazed," says Niro, "it looked like the houses in the high-end neighbor- hoods of Cabo." It turned out the house was inspired by the work of a well-known Cabo architect and designed by a Mexican archi- tect. "We knew right away that we would have to go back there in season two." Though they would return to the location, it was under a differ- ent set of circumstances. "I was scouting for another FX show," says Niro, "and we went to look at the house only to discover that during the last fire season, it had burned to the ground." After hearing this, and not wanting to abandon the owners, the producers and writers actually turned the devastation of the property into a story point, writing in that the house had burned and returning a number of times to the lot where the house once stood. A T E MATE Mayans was a finalist for the 2019 LMGI Award for Best Contem- porary Television Program earlier this year and, though they didn't win, they were incredibly grateful. "It really was a huge